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karma

Preface: I haven’t really wrote about Buddhism on this blog, but it is also a big component of my time here. This is a little snippet about it.

One of the most important “goal” in Mahayana Buddhism is to escape from the continuum of the Six Realms of Existence (God, Titans, Ghosts, Hell, Animal, and Human), in street lingo, when your ass dies your soul leaves your current body and enters another realm where you will live again in another body as a different being, and this all depends on your “street cred” in the current life, so if you did lots of good shit in this life, you will live well in the next life, if you did lots of shady stuff you will have to suffer in the next life, if you really didn’t do much, then you follow the natural order and continue to not do much, in the next life.

So how do you escape this never-ending cycle? There are countless ways and each individual needs to attain enlightenment through personal expressions of insights from Buddhism teaching, basically you can’t just read them books, you also have to actually go out and do things and through personal experience, obtain knowledge that is purely original to you. Kinda like research in college, or not. One of the main doctrines in this quest for enlightenment is understanding that “Happiness lies in a Sieve” (pls don’t confuse this with Nectar in a Sieve, different audience, different meaning). No matter how happy you feel at the moment or throughout your life, it is ephemeral as it is literally slipping through a sieve as we are speaking. Sadness also lies in a sieve, it too slips gently through the holes without a moment of rest. What this means to the Buddhist trying to gain enlightenment is that “emotions” are just products of our thoughts meant to trick us into feeling a certain way or reacting in a specific manner, the tricking begins with the mind and ends with the body and our actions. What regular normal folks can learn from this, is that we can’t place too much weight on things in life, lighten up a bit, don’t stress too much on things, if things don’t go our way “oh well then, no biggie”, if things do go our way “oh well then, no biggie”. You know this makes sense, cause people nowadays can be a little “exaggerated”, and over time that exaggeration becomes a habit and it becomes real.

Now why do we need to escape this continuous cycle of the 6 realms? Well you don’t need to, no one will force you, and you will live a perfectly awesome life without doing so. That’s the chill part about Buddhism is there ain’t nobody telling you to believe this or that, or this is the ultimate truth, this is the creator, this is why we are created, this is what you have to do. No, there ain’t none of that. They has something called “yuanfen” which is basically similar to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity, it literally means that what we experience and do in this life is influence by our actions in all of our previous lives. And only when the time is right, the person is willing, and the “yuanfen” there, may you be on the pass to learning Buddhism.

Personally, there are still way too many awesome things in this life that I haven’t experienced or learned (you know what I am saying?), so I ain’t really interested in enlightenment at the moment, but maybe when I am older and have seen this world, maybe then will the “yuanfen” be there and the timing be right.